Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  “Yes,” Adda said distantly, her drugged mind still on the damned awakened AIs.

  Around a curve of the hallway, Si Po slumped against a wall and panted. He wasn’t the sort of backup one hoped for on a dangerous mission. The Shieldrunners would be laughing their asses off. Now that she thought about it, she couldn’t help smiling a bit.

  “They’re stuck back there,” she said. “And I don’t think I pissed them off enough to make them find a way around. Let’s keep moving.” She patted his shoulder as she walked past.

  Si Po kept looking back toward the shut bulkhead, so Iridian keyed her mic again. “Babe, can you tell us if anything is coming our way, even if it looks friendly?”

  “Sure.” The rough edge to Adda’s voice was worrisome. She wouldn’t necessarily say anything if she were sick. She could keep a secret, that woman. Iridian’s comp pinged its announcement of a new download a moment later. “You’ll know as soon as I do. I’m also tracking Pel, so I don’t want to miss anything.”

  Iridian got the kind of full-body shiver she had stepping off high places before she saw how far away the ground was. “What the hell is he doing outside the base?”

  “Asking the refugees to share their pharmaceuticals.” Adda sighed. “I’m worrying enough for both of us. You, I trust to take care of yourself.”

  If Iridian and Si Po took a straight route without switching floors, then they had about two klicks of station to traverse. She hoped the remaining med team got back with similar ease, then snorted a laugh. They couldn’t all have it easy. With luck, the docs would get the short route.

  “What’s funny?” Si Po’s tone indicated that he could use a laugh.

  “Oh, just wondering whether good old Murphy is on our side or AegiSKADA’s today,” she said. He did not look relieved.

  They had a bit of a walk before they reached the reactor on the way to the control room. After a few steps in silence, Iridian asked, “So why’d you want to come with me instead of going back to the base, where it’s safe?”

  Si Po watched where he was stepping even though this stretch of hallway was relatively clear of debris. “After what happened to Xing, and Kaskade, and now Six, I guess . . . I’m tired of feeling terrified all the time, no matter what I do. I might as well feel terrified while doing something right.”

  Well, that wasn’t what I expected. Iridian smiled. “That’s called bravery. Keep pushing yourself and it’ll turn into a habit.” Si Po snorted like he didn’t believe her.

  * * *

  About a klick from what Adda had marked on the map as the security control room, Iridian left the exterior ring through a door labeled TO MAINTENANCE EXIT.

  “We’re going into space again?” Si Po’s voice was about an octave higher his usual one.

  “That’s where you people keep your radioactive salt, right?” she asked. When he just stared at her with his mouth hanging slightly open, she said, “Look, AegiSKADA’s running on a pseudo-organic quantum computer, yeah?” He nodded. “And what happens when you put, say, a kilo of radioactive liquid thorium next to a quantum computer?”

  There was the wide-eyed realization she was looking for. “The whole thing locks up until the decon cycle finishes!” he said.

  “That’s right.” She’d been expecting a more technical exclamation, but that was probably a sign that she’d spent too much time discussing the topic with Adda.

  To start the decon cycle and give Adda a chance to restart the AI in concurrence mode, where she might gain control of it, Iridian and Si Po had to get a radioactive thorium sample from one of the reactors powering the station. That meant walking along the hull, outside, in hard vac.

  Si Po’s suit had gaps at the wrist and knee joints where gloves from a smaller suit were jammed on and the protective pads in the knees had been inexpertly removed, judging by the scrape marks. “Has anybody vac-tested that suit?” Iridian asked him. He shrugged. “Then you need a new outfit. Something in white.”

  She spent a minute looking for the locker that should’ve been near anything that qualified as a “maintenance exit” and pointed out three white enviro suits in an open locker and another on the floor nearby. Safety standards required only one per airlock. “Looks like the med team was stockpiling suits along with the O2, so you have some size options,” she said. “At least these are designed for longer durations in the cold and the black.”

  “They’re not armored.” He was looking at them like they bit and stung, too.

  “You’ll suffocate long before AegiSKADA zaps you if you’ve got a bad seal. Bring the armored suit along, if you want.” With the oxygen tank he already carried, he’d have to drop the extra weight. She dug a small yellow case with the black radiation hazard symbol out of her pocket. “Take a D-MOG before you lock the hood down.” She opened her helmet and swallowed one too. It might be hours before they reached enviro healthy enough for her to raise her faceplate again. That’d scare him if she said it, though.

  When they exited on the station’s inner ring, Si Po froze. The stars wheeling beyond the far side of the station streaked across his faceplate. She bent to check the magnetic locks on his boots. The indicators lit green. Station grav was what held him to the hull. Locks just calmed people unused to extravehicular activity.

  She stood in front of him, blocking the cosmos from his view. “If you’re about to freak out, hang on to your gear with both hands and look at the hull.”

  “Already freaking,” he whispered.

  “You’re doing great. Hey, I appreciate the company, okay? Now let’s keep moving before the damned AI triangulates our position.” Iridian took point. After a few moments, his breathing quieted and his exhalations quit automatically activating his suit mic.

  Then she had to stop him. Why the hell did she keep thinking that the outside of the station was safer than the inside? “See those?” She pointed out several rectangular installations the size of a finger. They had the ragged edges and uniform coloration of prototype-quality printing. “Stay here. Do not move, do not speak. Try to be part of the hull. And if I, um, explode, go right back down the ladder and avoid anything that looks like those.” He swallowed so hard his head bobbed up and down in his helmet, but he stood still.

  The nearest device was based on a T ype 422 antipersonnel mine. She had studied them during Shieldrunner training. Even though ISVs highlighted models in their databases on a heads-up display, she’d trained to identify the devices on sight. The secessionists had EMP generators.

  She could flash Adda a picture to see if she could find schematics. However, Iridian and Si Po already stood within the five-meter lethality range. The trigger wasn’t overly sensitive. After the explosives she’d blocked in the docking bay, she couldn’t trust her shield to protect her from another blast until she checked it over. Si Po just wore an enviro suit. No need to distract Adda if she couldn’t do anything to help.

  Now that Iridian was looking for them, tiny mines stood out all over the hull. The pirates must’ve disarmed the ones near the base when they built it, or they chose the location for its lack of mines. Perhaps the area near the generator was the only mined section. The damned generator stuck up off the hull over the inner ring’s curve, blocking the spinning stars. They’d be there and gone with the radioactive thorium sample within twenty minutes if they could walk there without getting vaporized.

  They weren’t the only thing that’d vaporize. Enough mines going off at once might punch through the hull. The industrial area below them housed inactive machinery and stored scrap metal. If something down there was flammable, they might blow an even bigger hole in the place. A big enough explosion would set the whole station off its spin. Fugee kids bouncing off bulkheads aside, the pirate base couldn’t take that much torque.

  But in the long run, AegiSKADA was a hell of a lot more likely to kill all of them, and there wasn’t time to defuse all the mines, especially considering the cost of a mistake. Iridian retraced her steps back to Si Po, wishing
for more light than her headlamp offered. Any shadow might hide a mine. “Stay right behind me. And drag me back into the station if I blow my hand off, okay?”

  “Please don’t,” he whimpered.

  “Look, read the map while I clear us a path. See if you can find a safer way to access the generators.” She crept to the nearest mine and slowly knelt next to it, watching around the semitransparent shield for an external tripwire. If it had a heat sensor, she was so screwed. . . .

  She reached around the shield to thrust her fingers beneath the mine. She pressed up. It was magnetically sealed to the hull, but her adrenaline-fueled strength freed it. She chucked it ahead of her, toward the generator, and crouched behind the shield.

  The explosion itself was soundless, but her boots conveyed the hull’s violent shudder. Si Po yelped like a hurt puppy and curled into a ball on his side behind her. A second mine triggered where the first one went off, then two together, then four. Iridian kept her head turned away and braced as debris pelted the shield. The armor plate at the back of the helmet was much thicker than the faceplate.

  When the hull stopped shaking, she turned back to the mine field. Her first throw had cleared the mines in a wide, jagged swath all the way to the generator, and blackened and dented its wall. Meter-long jets of escaping atmo erupted from the hull in the blast zone.

  “That’s enough of that,” she said on the local channel. The last word dissolved into a burst of hysterical laughter she had to hold her breath to stop. “If I’d thrown it two centimeters farther, I’d’ve blown up the whole thing!”

  “Mierde fucking merciful Christ,” whispered Si Po.

  CHAPTER 19

  Charges Accrued: Unauthorized Access to Medical Information

  Nuclear generator blueprints were Adda’s entire world. They covered the black floor, high walls, and ceiling of her workspace. With enough concentration she could step from one side of the nonexistent room to the other. Worrying about Pel held her down to the physical pace her brain was used to. Symbols that designated doors and walkways morphed into little animations of him using them, sometimes confidently with healthy brown eyes, sometimes cautiously with scarred white ones.

  “Babe, the door is still locked.” Whenever Iridian spoke, Adda’s mind pulled in data from the sensor node nearest her to hover within arm’s reach. The nodes were much more widely spaced on the surface than in the interior, even before Iridian had destroyed the ones in easy reach. In the vid feed from this one, she and Si Po were small and distant. Adda couldn’t even see the locked door on vid, only on the blueprint.

  Si Po . . . she thought he’d gotten her the professional translator she was using now, but the Casey’s AI copilot had acquired it for her. If all three ships’ intelligences were awake, as the pirates had implied, the Casey could’ve learned a lot—everything—about Adda from the Apparition’s intelligence. Perhaps the Casey had been reaching out to her, offering a way to communicate.

  It would be difficult to tell what it’d overheard on tapped sensors, and impossible to guess how it processed that information. The Casey’s perspective would be fascinating. The mere presence of three awakened intelligences, all in one place, was practically a miracle. She really should find out why one of them was interested in her in particular. But at the moment she had neither the time nor mental energy to risk her mind against a truly awakened intelligence. Iridian needed her help against AegiSKADA.

  She crouched and rubbed a section of floor to black out that part of the blueprint. Crossing the workspace, she ripped the piece with the locked door off the ceiling. She pressed the flapping, writhing, leathery thing into the black section. Its mushroom-gilled maw snapped at her hand. Blackness oozed up in thin, connected strands to grasp the blueprint strip and envelop it.

  Lines and lines of code, representing her brain’s and her translator’s conclusions about the contents of AegiSKADA’s system, appeared in green on the black patch. Her professors would scold her and other students would laugh, but she just wasn’t getting the right messages through. This might spell out why in something closer to the intelligence’s native language.

  Ah. She wanted to create sensor data signaling that there simultaneously was and was not a hull puncture leaking atmo beside the door Iridian wanted open. What she’d missed on the conceptual version was that she had to repeat the message 3,200 times per second to keep the door open. Oh gods, and one more thing that might not be obvious . . . “Keep your helmets on inside!” she said over the comm channel.

  “There it goes,” Iridian said. “You’re the best!” On the vid now showing in midair in the workspace, her and Si Po’s tiny figures disappeared into the generator.

  Inside the power plant were more sensors. Adda’s vid of Iridian’s progress clarified, zoomed in, and acquired vibration, infrared, and muffled sound. She skimmed three years of observations from the power plant nodes before she saw anybody go in. Spacelink had probably put the plant in some kind of dormant state after shutting down the engines to abandon the station.

  Someone or something—HarborMaster, most likely—had maintained the station’s spin, the medical center module’s atmosphere, and even the algae farm to support the Spacelink medical team. It might even have enlisted AegiSKADA’s assistance in keeping the physicians in the one part of the station where it maintained a healthy environment, as spacefarers would say.

  When the refugees arrived the following year, HarborMaster would’ve had to restart the environmental controls throughout the station, and that would’ve required a lot of energy. They were lucky the power plant worked as well as it did. No one had checked on it since Spacelink operated the station. If Iridian found out, she would rant for a week about ignoring maintenance schedules.

  Pel signaled Adda’s comp. The blueprints and sensor nodes tracking Iridian flashed away, replaced with a detailed readout of his current status.

  “Adda.” She stilled. No good news ever followed her proper name out of Pel’s mouth. “That weird info you were telling me about, about movement in the docking bay? They’re mercs.”

  She checked her feeds while she searched her brain for what that abbreviation might mean. The mysterious human movement was now traversing the station’s residential module on Level 2, which connected directly with the refugees’ docking bay. The activity was attracting the vast majority of the drones on the station. Several nodes went dark, accompanied by automated structural damage reports.

  Mercenaries. Armed. The kind of invaders AegiSKADA was developed to defend against. The irritated skin around her eyes burned as they widened in horror. That would increase AegiSKADA’s aggression, but she didn’t have enough information to predict how that would affect its targeting. Things could get better for the pirates and refugees, or much, much worse.

  But Pel was still in the refugee camp. He wouldn’t be able to hear the mercenaries yet. The camp’s cam feeds were still up, so she tapped into those and started looking for him while she asked, “How do you know who they are?”

  “I’ve been listening to a couple of them hassle the fugees. They talk a lot.”

  The data around Adda flickered as she processed what he said. “But what are they doing here?”

  “Transorbital Voyages, the corp that owned that colony ship you brought us, hired these jerks to kick our asses, or get the ship back, or both,” said Pel. She finally found a cam at the right angle to see him beside one of the shipping containers in the refugees’ docking bay.

  Transorbital could afford a small army, especially if they thought they could recover their ship after they took over the station. She designated a corner of her display to track the mercenaries. Something they carried deactivated sensor nodes within about ten meters of their location, and the curving hallways made it difficult to count their full complement. The amount of movement more distant nodes reported suggested that there were a lot of them. “How did they know the Prosperity Dawn was here?” she asked Pel absently while she followed the trail of dea
ctivated nodes.

  He huffed a disgusted sigh. “Sissy, where else would it be?”

  “Oh,” said Adda. “True.” Barbary Station was the only station for millions of kilometers around it.

  Adda should have planned for this. Timing constraints had forced her to stage the ambush on the Earth side of the lead cloud, where the ITA or Transorbital Voyages would’ve received some signal betraying the hijacked ship’s trajectory. When she made the plan with Pel—and Si Po, though she didn’t know it then—to send the ships to the coordinates she provided, she had assumed that successful pirates would have a communication-jamming procedure. It would’ve been a logical assumption, if living in an impenetrable station hadn’t made that a low priority for Sloane’s crew. Of course, with enough money and time, anything was penetrable.

  A loud snap of discharged electricity came from somewhere behind Pel. He ducked, and she reconfigured her vid feed. The refugees had destroyed all the sensor nodes they could reach, so she peered down at their docking bay from two stories above. A shouting crowd rushed toward the hallway Sloane’s crew had followed when they’d been running from AegiSKADA. Adda adjusted her view to include the area near the rubble barricade.

  Smoke rose from a body facedown on the floor beyond the rubble. Another refugee raced along the safest path, designated by yellow tape, and dragged the body toward the container village.

  “Shit, I’ve got to go,” said Pel.

  “No, you don’t! Get on the refugees’ colony ship and stay there.”

  “Oh sure, I’ll hide with the kids while everybody else fights for their lives. No thanks.” He cut the message.

  Footsteps beyond her tank told her the pirates were on the move too. Everything was happening too fast. She tuned them out and focused on the mercenaries and their possible progress toward Iridian until pounding on the trapdoor left her staring at her message to herself on the workspace generator’s ceiling.